MY RUIN: In Love With My Step-Uncle-Chapter 74 - Seventy-Four: Pair of Stormy Eyes

//CLARA//

The water wasn’t cold anymore.

It was heavy, liquid velvet that pressed against my eyelids and filled my ears with a dull, rhythmic thrumming. As I sank, the weight of the water seemed to peel away the layers of the woman I had become in this century. The silk dress, the blood on my foot, the sting of the blade... they all drifted away, leaving only the core of me behind.

My mind, starved for oxygen, began to fracture, and in that terrible darkness, fragments of another life flickered—the one I had been ripped from, the one that had spat me into this gilded nightmare.

They were ghosts.

I saw myself on the runway, the spotlight so bright it erased everything but me. I saw the neon pulse of Times Square. I smelled the expensive scent of my Manhattan office and heard the click of my heels on the polished floors of my own beauty empire.

"Clara, you’re late!" Lola’s voice echoed through the dark.

I saw her face, her eyes crinkling with laughter as we clinked champagne glasses in a penthouse overlooking the glittering city below.

She had been there through every heartbreak, every triumph, every three a.m. meltdown before a major show.

I could almost feel her hands on my shoulders, steadying me when I feared I’d stumble in front of the world and lose everything I’d built.

"Breathe, Clara," she’d whisper in my memory. "You got this. You don’t just walk the runway. You own it."

I saw my own face on a billboard, untouchable and perfect. It was a life built on gloss and ambition, a world where the only monsters were competitors in boardrooms.

It felt like a dream. The thought was calm. Quiet. Almost peaceful. It’s just sad that I’ll die in the 19th century instead of my own timeline.

I stopped kicking. I let the bubbles escape my lips, rising toward a surface I no longer cared to reach. My life in the future was a masterpiece I’d left unfinished, and my life in the past was a tragedy I was finally closing.

Is this what it felt like, Eleanor? To realize the water was kinder than whatever you left on the shore?

Above me, the surface was a blurred mirror of orange fire and gunshots, the chaos of Silas’s destruction playing out in distant vibrations through the water.

But as the darkness began to fray at the edges, one final image clawed its way through the gloss of my old life.

It wasn’t a billboard. It wasn’t a skyscraper.

It was a pair of stormy eyes, terrifying, and filled with a plea that had shattered my soul.

Casimir. A shadow broke the surface.

Then a pair of hands clutched at my waist, fingers digging into the soaked fabric of my dress, gripping with desperate strength. I was being hauled upward, my body breaking through the water’s membrane with a violence that tore at my hair, my skin, my lungs.

The air hit my face like a slap, bitter cold and alive with the smell of gunpowder and burning oil, and I was dragged back onto the slick wood of the lower pier, my body landing with a wet thud that drove what little breath I had managed to capture back out of my chest.

I coughed, violently, my body convulsing as it rejected the harbor’s filth, salt water burning my throat and nose with each heave.

My vision swam, dark spots pulsing at the edges, but through the haze I saw him—Casimir, his face above me, his eyes wild with a relief so fierce it bordered on madness, his hair plastered to his skull, his hands shaking as they cupped my face.

His white shirt soaked through, dripping, and stained with my blood.

"Clara," he choked out. "Clara, look at me. I have you. I have you now."

I tried to speak, but my throat was raw, my voice a hoarse whisper that barely carried.

"Casimir..."

He didn’t look relieved. He looked destroyed. He fell to his knees, his hands were everywhere, checking for injuries. He flinched when his fingers brushed the jagged, blooming red at my collarbone. Then he saw my foot, the wood still buried deep and the blood mixing with the harbor salt.

When he touched me again, it was so light I could barely feel it, like he was afraid I would fall apart if he pressed too hard.

"Shh. I’ve got you. You’re safe now," he rasped, though he looked like he was the one dying.

He moved behind me, and I heard his breath catch when he saw my wrists. The ropes had eaten into the skin, leaving weeping tracks that circled my arms like bracelets made of pain. He tried to untie the knots, but his fingers were too clumsy, too stiff with a rage that hadn’t found its end. They slipped against the wet hemp, and he couldn’t get a grip.

A low, guttural curse ripped from his throat when they refused to give.

Then, in a flash of steel, he sliced through the rope in one jagged motion. 𝚏𝗿𝗲𝐞𝐰𝚎𝕓𝐧𝚘𝘃𝗲𝐥.𝐜𝚘𝕞

The hemp parted with a sound like a sigh, and my hands fell free.

The blood rushed back into my fingers, sharp and painful, and I cried out as sensation returned in a flood of pins and needles. Casimir pulled my arms around his neck and crushed me against his chest.

I felt his heartbeat against my own, fast and wild and alive.

The silence that followed was louder than the gunshots.

It was a heavy, suffocating blanket that settled over the docks, broken only by the wet slap of the tide against the wood. I leaned back, my hands still tingling with the ghost of the ropes, and my eyes found the spot where Silas had stood.

He was there. But he wasn’t standing.

He lay face down, his body a twisted, broken thing against the salt-slicked planks. The blood was everywhere—a dark, spreading map that looked black under the flickering yellow lanterns.

It pooled in the grooves of the wood, steaming in the cold night air. The copper tang of it filled the back of my throat, thick and cloying, mixing with the salt air until I felt like I was drowning all over again—this time on dry land.

My gaze drifted to his face. His head was turned toward me, his eyes wide and glassy, staring directly into mine with a lifeless, fixed intensity. They were the eyes of a man who had seen hell and hadn’t come back.

A jagged sob broke from my chest, my entire body convulsing as the reality of the slaughter hit me. I tried to look away, but the image was burned into my retinas.

"Don’t," Casimir’s voice was a low growl of protection.

He pulled me back into the hollow of his shoulder, his large hand cupping the back of my head to force my face into his neck, shielding me from the carnage.

"Don’t look at him, Clara. He’s gone."

"He’s... he’s dead," I choked out, my voice hitching against his soaked shirt. "Did you...?"

"Yes."

I felt the vibration of his chest as he pulled me tighter, his grip almost bruising, his breath hot against my damp hair. He did not sound guilty. He sounded like a man who had made a choice and would make it again without hesitation.

"I killed him," Casimir hissed. "And if the devil were to hand him back to me, I would kill him a thousand times more, in a thousand different ways, until the very memory of his hands on you is scorched from this earth."